A diary entry from poet Robert Graves, “Getting started using TEI” http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/GettingStarted/html/in.html

Text encoding involves rendering transcriptions of documents (books, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, engravings, and so on) into machine-readable form, so that they may be processed by computers in a variety of ways. Most of us are familiar with word-processing programs that create encoded texts for printing; and many of us have heard about HTML, a way of marking up, or annotating, a text for display on the World Wide Web.

What most people don’t know is that text markup has uses far beyond simple presentation (formatting and print layout). It can be used to support fundamental scholarly practices like glossing, annotation, linking, and other kinds of semantic analysis and interpretation, making the scholar’s intellectual work readable by machines.

“William Atheling,” for example, is just a string of letters to a computer; while

<persName key=”Pound, Ezra”>William Atheling</persName>

lets computer programs share a researcher’s knowledge about the actual identity of the person being named (in this instance Ezra Pound’s music critic nom de plume, “William Atheling”) .

Since the 1980s, a growing number of scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences have been developing a common set of markup practices for humanities-oriented texts. This group, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has produced a well-known and heavily used set of guidelines and associated apparatus for marking up everything from poems to phone books; TEI-encoded texts are the basis of many of the best-known and most highly regarded digital humanities resources (the Modernist Journals Project; Brown University Women Writers Project; Perseus Project; Documenting the American South; and many others.

This workshop is intended to provide a hands-on introduction to text encoding, including a ‘gentle introduction to XML‘, examples of the varied uses of TEI, and use of the TEI guidelines.
– Clifford Wulfman

About the Instructors:Clifford Wulfman is coordinator of Library Digital Initiatives and Director of the Blue Mountain Project. In addition to many years’ experience with text encoding, Cliff has published numerous articles on topics in the digital humanities and is co-author, with Robert Scholes, of Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction.

Ben Johnston is Senior Educational Technologist and Manager at OIT’s Humanities Resource Center (HRC) in East Pyne, and an active member of the Digital Humanities Initiative.